Jon Rombach is a writer and river guide headquartered in Oregon's Wallowa Valley. His newspaper column, 'And Furthermore,' appears in the Wallowa County Chieftain. The Gearboat Chronicles cover life on the river, updated every week at windingwatersrafting.com. Publications include Utne Reader, Backpacker, Sports Afield, Mother Earth News and other fine, upstanding journals you may or may not have ever heard of.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Attention People Who Make Axe Handles These Days: You Are Not Good At What You Do.

You can see by the faded pink on this fiberglass handle here that the axe has clearly been out in the elements, got UVed, brittle and broke. That chunk missing from the middle is where I got pissed and swung the thing into the wood pile, visualizing heads of people in the fiberglass handle industry. It was cathartic.

As far as me letting this get UVed, an axe isn't something I will ever bring inside out of the weather, swaddle in velvet and prop it's feet up next to the fire. It's an axe. It's supposed to be tough. It belongs outside.

I probably shouldn't get worked up about handles on tools. But new axe and maul handles break at a discouraging rate and I've gone through a passel of them and it pierces me off. You bust a handle, go to get a replacement and the new wood replacement handles I've tried also break, then it's just a couple bucks more for a whole new axe with another crappy handle and there you are again later, swirling around in a predicament nobody cares about but me and it's lonely, so lonely.

In contrast, here's the double-bit axe I got from my grandfather that's, what, probably at least 30 years old at least and still cranking out what it's supposed to do with the original handle.

I burn wood in the house, my office, my hot tub and my shop. Lots of chopping. I like it when people bitch about the cost of heating oil or propane because that's a problem I don't share.

On the bright side, I bought a new handle to have laying around and went and tapped on old head on there after breaking that fiberglass piece of shit -- though I see now I should have kept tapping, as this thing isn't quite seated down right . . . but I like this Norlund head. Cuts so good I just have to hold it up to a piece of firewood and the pieces are intimidated into splitting themselves.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Santa Claus sent me a letter this year, via his attorneys,
and I’m trying not to panic. The upshot of this letter, or “injunction,” as
they call it, is that my requests for future gifts are being put on hold until
I can demonstrate appropriate use of gifts already received, namely a train set
I was all excited about but haven’t been using.

I’m in a bind here, because the train isn’t really mine. It
belongs to Wallowa and Union counties. They bought it and played with it some
at first, then let other kids park their train cars on the tracks. Then last
year I got all excited because there was talk of the train carrying rafters and
fishermen again between Rondowa and Minam, about nine miles along the Wallowa
River down to the Grande Ronde through a roadless section. It’s a beautiful
stretch for day trips and steelheading. I work as a rafting guide so having
that train service again was splendid news.

That’s when I wrote Santa asking to pretty please make it
true that the train would start running again. And it did, sort of. I live by
the tracks and waved at it a few times. But I should have been more specific
and asked for the train to keep running. Especially the 48 fishing trips and 48
rafting trips that were talked about, but didn’t materialize.

Wallowa-Union Railroad Authority, or WURA (pronounced
“wooh-ruh,” I think), contracted with Sierra Nevada and Pacific Railroad, or
SNAP (pronounced, “where are you guys?”) to take over managing the trains. SNAP
crackled and popped with all sorts of fun ideas, including the notion of
bringing in an old fancy choo choo train called the Blue Goose that runs on
steam. But then it appeared all their steam got used up talking about neato
ideas.

But let’s back up. Wouldn’t Sierra Nevada and Pacific
Railroad be SNaPR, instead of SNAP? You can’t just promote “and” to a capital
letter and leave out the “Railroad” part, can you? That might give the
impression you’re good at snappy presentations but aren’t too concerned with
the actual railroad part. Coincidentally, that’s the impression I’ve been
getting.

But on the front page of the Chieftain last week (Rail
line’s operator hopes to renegotiate pact with counties), Rob Ruth reports that
the head of SNaPR, Court Hammond, is gathering steam to get things back on
track. That was two train references in one sentence. I hope you enjoyed that.

Let me know if I can help, Mr. Hammond. I’ll run that Minam
to Rondowa stretch myself if it will help. Set me up with a handcar and I’ll
hire some local football players to crank the handles up and down and we’ll get
rail service going through that gem of a river canyon. We’ll call it Old
Fashioned Way Railways, or SNaZZY, for short.

I caught six steelhead one day on a steelhead train
excursion back when it used to run. That’s a great day for any steelheader and
if you’ve seen me fish, you know it’s mind boggling. I met other people on the
train with similar experiences.

I truly believe that river train will be good
for Wallowa County. People were coming out here from all over to fish from the
steelhead train, spending their money at Wallowa County hotels, restaurants,
stores, speakeasies, gas stations, spreading out dollars. And steelhead seasons
are outside normal tourism months. It was cold and gray, but folks were still
enjoying Wallowa County and talking about bringing their families back during
the summer. You could just feel the economy being stimulated.

Tom Farnam losing his train of thought.

So
let’s get that train rolling. Otherwise, as Santa’s North Pole legal team
pointed out in their nasty letter to me, if we’re not going to play with our
train set there are thousands of bicycles delivered each year to Wallowa County
residents and visitors who would be tickled to peddle down the path if it were
converted to a trail. Bike paths also stimulate the economy. We could call it
the Wallowa-Union Scenic Bikeway, or SHAZAM, for short.

Jon
Rombach is a local columnist for the Chieftain. He wrote to Santa this year
asking for the forest roads to stay open so he can cut firewood. Also a pony.
And a Red Ryder BB gun.

Awww...thanks, Wallowa County

Next year, I'm going for best cheeseburger.

'And Furthermore' column

Gearboat Chronicles

I worked for years as a radio announcer and dj inside a small, soundproof room. Loved radio, but talking at that microphone in the teeny-tiny booth finally brought on the stir crazies. Shifting to newspaper reporter brought on the just crazies. I needed some outdoors and river guiding in Hells Canyon certainly took care of that. The Gearboat Chronicles are dispatches from the river, updated every Monday. Click that picture up there to connect with the Winding Waters River Expeditions site.

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'Compost Apprentice' in 'Readings for Writers'

It's awfully nice to be in a table of contents with the likes of Ed Abbey, Maya Angelou, Mike Royko, Dave Barry and Malcolm X. My favorite discussion question: "How does Rombach deal with situations that call for four-letter words?" Answer: Usually, he uses them.

'Number 98: Eulogy for a Red Bus'

Reports of the demise of Glacier's red buses were greatly exaggerated. By me. I drove one in college, then wrote this when the fleet was being retired. Ford stepped in, the buses got overhauls and they're still on the road.

The Sasquatch In Us All

Sports Afield

Nice things people say

Moonshine Ink should be spilled on every community. This independent monthly is published by Mayumi Elegado and her band of freedom fighters in Truckee, CA. See for yourself at moonshineink.com.

I moved some words around for them a while back, and Mayumi slipped this in an issue:

"Copy editor Jon Rombach is adept and freaking funny. In one of his recent emails, he had this to say about chopping up copy: '...added the new ones and took a machete to the previous ones. It's at 620 words. I can amputate something else to get to 550 but they might begin reading like fortune cookies...this 'asap' hasn't been very 's' – but I've been attacked by a string of people who interpret ‘busy’ and ‘no-time-right-now’ as their cue to tell a long yarn about how other people interrupt them when they're trying to get [stuff] done. I'm now cloistered in a dark remove, and will push ahead.'"________Former Chieftain editor Michael Burkett may or may not cheat at Scrabble. I'm not saying he does. The following is from his farewell Chieftain column:

"...I'm going to miss being the first human being on the planet to read the latest column by Jon Rombach. Lest you've somehow failed to notice, this local fellow is a national-level talent. By the way, if you're a fan of easy money, challenge Jon to a game of Scrabble. Even if you've lost half your brain in a tragic...."